Phase 3. Extruding the front of the monitor

Ok, now the fun part begins. By the way, did you save your work yet?

Now that we converted the box to an editable mesh, we can change and expand it by working on a sublevel. An editable mesh has 5 sublevels: Vertexes, Edges, Faces, Polygons, and Elements. In this tutorial, we will be focusing on Vertexes and Edges, and mostly on polygons. To select one of these sublevels, click the + sign in front of Editable Mesh on the Modify tab of the Command Panel and select the desired sublevel. When you select one of the sublevels, you will have a huge set of options on the scrollable bottom half of the Modify tab.


Picture 3a

We are going to start with the front side of the monitor by extruding and scaling some polygons. It may seem a lot of work at first, but once you get the hang of it you will be doing similar stuff in seconds. First, make sure you select the sublevel Polygon as depicted in Picture-3a above. Next, select the polygon on the front of the box. You can do this in the Front view, or in the Perspective view as displayed below in Picture-3b.

Picture 3b

At the bottom of the Modify tab, scroll down below and select Local and click the Extrude button as depicted in Picture-3c below.


Picture 3c

Now notice that the mouse pointer changes when you move it over the polygon. Click the selected polygon, hold down the mouse button, and move up to extrude the polygon. You should have something similar as depicted in Picture-3d below. It doesn't matter how far you extrude, because we are going to move back the polygon that is now selected.


Picture 3d

Click the Select and Move button on the toolbar and move back the polygon as depicted in Picture-3e below, to get the results as in Picture 3f.


Picture 3e


Picture 3f

It may look like we have the same box as we started with, but the additional polygons we created by extruding are still there, as you will see in our next step. Important: instead of manually moving the polygon back to the place we extruded it from, you can move it back while you extrude it. For example, in the above example you moved up to extrude the polygon, if you move down again (while still holding down the mouse button) you can move the extruded polygon back to its exact original place.
Click the Select and Uniform Scale button  and scale the extruded polygon as depicted in Picture-3g below. You can do this in either the Perspective or Front view. How far you want to scale it depends on how big you want the screen and the frame to be, just keep it realistic.


Picture 3g

Click the Extrude button again (see Picture-3c), and extrude the polygon inwards as depicted in Picture-3h below by moving down while extruding.


Picture 3h

Now right-click the Top on the Top view and select Wireframe as depicted in Picture 3i below.


Picture 3i

Click the Select and Move button again, and move back the polygon we just extruded to almost its original place, as depicted in Picture 3-j below:

Picture 3j

Unless you have a big screen monitor, you probably need to switch to maximum view for the next step. You can do this by clicking the Min/Max Toggle button on the bottom right (see Picture-3k below). You should do this while the Front view is selected. Press the Min/Max Toggle button whenever you want to return to the 4 views.


Picture 3k

Click the Select and Uniform Scale button again and make the polygon just a little bit smaller by scaling it down as depicted in Picture-3l below.


Picture 3l

Now extrude it inwards just a little bit. You may need to change to the Top view and use the Min/Max Toggle button again to switch to maximum view, and/or zoom in on the Top view. You should end up with something very similar to Picture-3m below:

Picture 3m

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